marvelous

Upon first glance, Xhang’s seems like your “conventional” art studio that you might expect to find on TV, what some set designer thought a studio should look like. You go in, and there are various works in progress. Preliminary sketches, tubes of paint scattered around an easel and palette with several uncleaned and hardening brushes laid upon it. Various seemingly random items tacked onto the wall. A mundane clock you quickly glance over because you’ve seen that kind of clock 100 times a day every day. As you absorb the space and let yourself become adjusted to it, looking around, you become aware of the quiet. The only sound is the quiet ticking of the clock somewhere in the background of your head. But the moment that the sound of the clock is brought into your conscious, it changes. You weren’t even aware of it a moment before. There has been no drastic change in the space and the sounds. It was as still when you entered the room as it is now. Or was it? How can you be sure that the clock just didn’t start ticking just now? You assume it hasn’t because that’s not what clocks do. It was ticking before the same as it is ticking now. So how come you didn’t hear it when you entered this room, the same as you do now? It’s so loud to you now, it slices through the quiet. You close your eyes and feel the ticking. You try to synchronize your heart with the tick, tick, tick. Now that you have become aware of the time, you open your eyes and glance at the clock. To see how long you’ve been there, or just out of habit. That’s when you notice. You squint as if there is a bright light or you have trouble seeing, but there IS no bright light and you DON’T have trouble seeing. You can’t read it. You can’t read the clock because the clock is not readable. It has your standard numbers in English, all in the right place. But there’s no minute hand, no hour hand. Just the second hand, quietly ticking away, business as usual. It seems to slowly smile at you. You become disoriented. You feel tricked. In a subtle way, like the way the clock revealed itself to you after hiding itself from you right in front of you. The peculiar time that it keeps consumes you now. Now it’s your turn to smile. The space has fully transformed. This is not an ordinary place.